


Kokhav

by Chestnut_filly



Series: Actual Fic [13]
Category: Mary Russell - Laurie R. King, The Golem and the Jinni - Helene Wecker
Genre: Astronomy, Boats and Ships, Collection: Purimgifts Day 2, Female Jewish Character, Gen, Mysterious Women on Boats, O Jerusalem-era
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-01
Updated: 2018-03-01
Packaged: 2019-03-23 06:19:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,324
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13781556
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Chestnut_filly/pseuds/Chestnut_filly
Summary: “I have always enjoyed walking at night,” Chava says, still smiling just a little. “This ship is difficult, so little space and so many strong personalities prowling it, no room for roaming. I could almost wish for a walk across the seabed.”She’s still smiling her small smile, but Mary has the strangest impression she means that quite literally, in a way that isn’t macabre at all.





	Kokhav

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Kass](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kass/gifts).



✡ - ✡ - ✡

There is one more set of passengers on the boat coming back from Jerusalem. A man, graceful the way fighters are, and a woman, who dresses like the most frum of Mary’s eldest female relatives but might as well be made of stone for all the tossing and rocking of the boat moves her. They are obviously connected to Mycroft somehow, or they wouldn’t be here, but Mary can’t help feeling that they are even stranger, more out of place, than she and Holmes are. 

Luckily for their act, and luckily for Mary’s peace of mind, the two passengers seem even more determined to avoid her and Holmes than she and Holmes are to avoid them. The only information they offer is that they were in Syria before they were in Palestine, and in New York before that. They do not explain why they are returning to London rather than America, and Mary feels it best not to pry. Mycroft’s affairs are Mycroft’s affairs.

Just once, she exchanges more than the barest pleasantries with the woman. It’s past midnight, past a particularly horrible mock fight with Holmes, and Mary takes to the deck. For all the practice, for all that she knows it isn’t real, she feels ill and miserable. She is all the way to the prow of the ship before she notices the woman standing by the rail, so utterly still and quiet that she might as well have been a misplaced figurehead. 

“I apologize for startling you,” the woman says, her voice quiet and even. Like her clothes, the tinge of accent below the New York reminds Mary of visiting her grandmothers as a very young girl. But this woman can hardly be older than Mary herself- her skin is as fine and unblemished as fired porcelain, no lines or weathering. 

“That’s quite all right,” Mary replies, a little shaky from the new adrenaline of the fright laying over the fading energy of her verbal battle with Holmes. “I didn’t see you.” 

The silence stretches. The woman sways in time with the ship- not like a sailor, accustomed to the movements of the sea, bobbing in counterpoint, but like another mast or smokestack or railing, something unseparated from the deck beneath their feet. It’s unsettling. 

“Are you a dancer?” Mary asks, trying to divine what profession could give this woman in her long skirts such - heaviness. It’s like nothing she has seen before. 

The woman smiles. “A baker,” she says. “And a seamstress.” 

“Oh.” 

Again, a silence. “My husband is a coppersmith,” she offers, as if trying to make up for some perceived deficiency in her answer. 

“Ah,” Mary says, entirely on the wrong foot and hating it. “My companion keeps bees,” she offers, feeling as though the truthfulness that coexists with the absolute paucity of that answer is fair recompense for the mystery of this strange, strange woman and her hidden husband. 

“My name is Chava,” the woman says, as though they have finally crossed some necessary barrier of intimacy. 

“Mine is Mariam,” Mary responds. It seems to suit this conversation better than Russell, certainly better than Mary, certainly. She feels as though this woman, this Chava, with her baking and her quiet smile and her beautiful dark features, would appreciate it. 

Indeed, Chava’s lips quirk in a little smile. “Did you come out for the air?” she asks. 

“Yes- well- yes, I did.” Mary feels her throat tighten slightly again. The fear and then curiosity had driven the fight with Holmes from her mind, but it comes back. They’d fought about her studies this time- useless, useless, Holmes had said, and how easy that was for _him_ to say, with his history in one piece and enshrined in every book in the Bod-

“I have always enjoyed walking at night,” Chava says, still smiling just a little. “This ship is difficult, so little space and so many strong personalities prowling it, no room for roaming. I could almost wish for a walk across the seabed.” 

She’s still smiling her small smile, but Mary has the strangest impression she means that quite literally, in a way that isn’t macabre at all. 

“Are you a wanderer too, Mariam?” Chava asks.  

Am I a wanderer? Mary wonders. What sort of a question is that? Though, she thinks to herself, I might be, now. I wandered the desert and I am wandering back home, and when I am home I will be wandering still. 

“My father used to say,” she begins, not quite knowing where the words come from, “That trees have roots but Jews have legs.” 

Chava smiles just a fraction wider. “I myself am glad for my legs,” she says. “They can both walk and root. I would not like to be like my husband, who flies.” Once again, Mary is struck by the strangest sense of literality. 

“What does your companion do, then?” she asks. “Does he wander?” 

Mary opens her mouth to answer, something glib, something automatic- but no. This is part of the game she and Holmes are playing, this long, terrible game. Nothing glib. Not for a good long while.  

Instead, she considers for half a second and decides on, “Not as much as he could.” 

Chava keeps smiling, cocks her head the the side. “And yet here you are on this boat with him, yes?” 

Mary mutters something noncommittal. It was true, after all, and not even the Holmes she is constructing as her opponent in this indefinite fight could be called staid. 

Chava seems to feel no impulse to call Mary out on her half-hearted response, and they lapse into the ocean silence, the waves licking at the hull and Chava rocking in time with the deck. It is pleasant, in a way. Perhaps with someone else Mary would feel compelled to speak, but somehow the sea noises and Chava herself demand no such efforts. In any case, she feels empty of words, scraped out like her throat from shouting. 

The stars are as beautiful as ever, though the sea rocks too choppily to reflect them. Mercury, the rabbis’ Kokhav, drifts about the western skies, and the moon shows hardly a sliver, not bright enough to outshine the stars. 

“Did you know that the rabbis just called Mercury ‘the planet?’” Mary asks the waves. “First among equals, and all that.” 

“I walk in the city nights, and don’t see much of the stars,” Chava responds. “My husband likes them better. That one he calls the Wanderer.” 

She turns her body towards Mary, putting her back to the rail, pulling herself upright against the rock if the ship with the ease of a starling riding the lashings of a twig. 

“It always comes back to where it begins, though, like him, so I don’t know how much of a wanderer it can be,” she continued. “Like your mother’s mother’s name- Miriam, who always walked towards home while she wandered.” 

She smiles again, her lips very solid somehow, her presence steady on the sidling boat, sure like a well sunk deep. 

“If you need a baker or a seamstress in New York, Mariam, ask your wanderer’s brother where to find us,” she says, and walks gracefully, steadily past Mary, who stays on the deck staring at Mercury until the wind grows too bitter. 

She and Chava do not wander into each other again before the docking, or indeed before the moors or India or even San Francisco. There is a neatly tailored jacket, though, that fits perfectly through the shoulders and wrists, that appears on the Suffolk cottage doorstep not long after Mary is healed enough from Donleavy's bullet to consider wearing garments with sleeves again. It is a lovely midnight blue, with pewter buttons like planets. The package is unmarked but for a Brooklyn post office’s address and a strange smear of clay dust on one of the corners. Even Holmes can make nothing of it.  

**Author's Note:**

> Kokhav meaning both "the planet" and Mercury. Hebrew astronomy/astrology is pretty cool, guys.


End file.
